DEGROFF@INTELLICORP.ARPA (Leslie DeGroff) (08/02/88)
Date: Wed, 27 Jul 88 16:53 EDT
From: Leslie DeGroff <DEGROFF@INTELLICORP.ARPA>
Subject: root issue of free will and problems in war zones
To: ailist@ai.ai.mit.edu
cc: degroff@INTELLICORP.ARPA
The new AI in the war zone and the on going free will discussions
seem to both skirt around one of the fundamental crux's of Intelligence,
natural and artificial (and even "Non Intelligent" decision making processes)
There is a pair of Quantities that appear in all decision
processes, one is the information/knowledge in the "system/agent/individual"
and the other is the scale and variation of the universe to be modeled.
For the real world the latter is always much much greater than the prior.
Universe >> some subsystem. Even if we take out infinities there is this
many order of magnitude scale problem. This inequally holds regaurdless of
the equivalence of the internal representation to the external "facts"
Engineers, Programmers, and line managers get their noses rubbed in this
fact pretty often (but perhaps not enough to prevent horrible/scary/dumb
mistakes from being made) This ratio more or less means that systems
working in the real world can always be surprised and/or make mistakes.
The universe does have regularities that allow the causal and structural
mapping of a smaller "Mind" or "representation" to cover a lot of ground
but it also remains filled with places where you need to know the specifics
to know what is happening. Even simple Newtonian physics of multiple
orbiting bodies becomes a combinatorial problem very quickly.
In regards to the war zone, we have a similar case (the Russians and KAL)
which had no particular computer component... Just miss or missing
communications/information and a human decision. There is a limit to
the precision and availability of knowledge and an even lower limit to
the amount of processing that can be done. The universe and Murphy
will get us everytime we start thinking "it's ALL under control".
Related to this fundamental fact is that in many cases "WILL" turns
out to be a concept used by humans to represent the immediate
uncomputability/unpredictability of peices of the real Universe including
our own actions and conciousness. I find WILL to be a much more productive
concept to contemplate than FREE WILL. I can be scientifically educated
and still talk and think of inanimate objects like a truck or a storm as
having willful behavior. Even simple physical systems with unsensed
or unpredictable variability will often be treated as if decisions are
being made; ?Will my door handle give me a static spark today? Much of
the discussion on determinism vs non is simply missing the point that neither
our brains nor our computers will be able to "compute" in real time all
that might be of importance to a given situation and no realistic set of
sensors can gather enough information to be "complete".
From an AI perspective these issues are at the heart of the hardness
in the problems; how can we have an open ended learning system with out
catatonic behavior? (computation of all derivations from an ever increasing
fact base)and what kind of knowledge representation is efficient for learning
from sensors, effective at cutting off computation so that time critical
decisions can be made and knowing when knowledge contained dosn't apply
(classic case of the potential infinity of negations)
(Trick question for the brain modelers, Does sleep act like a Lisp Garbage
collector ie is part of the sleep process an elimination of material that
is not to be stored and reorganizing the rest of the material)
Much of applied statistics and measurement theory is oriented to
METRICs for comparing systems and models and determining "predicts correctly
and fails to predict" where the models are parametric equations.
Question is how to evaluate a model for "surprise potential" or
"unincluded critcal factors".
Les Degroff DeGroff@intellicorp.com
(I disclaim all blame, I aint paid to think but I have this bad habit,
neither parents, schools or employers have been able to cure it)
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